I'm very surprised that they wouldn't be at least planning to recover the craft - that would give them all sorts of validation about the actual impact (heh) of launch and re-entry, and could help them get to the next iteration faster. I assume they know what they're doing, but TFA didn't include anything approaching a reason for not attempting recovery.

I confess the possibility of misunderstanding. However, when I've had multiple Atheists assert that belief in God is {foolhardy, evil, insert_negative_emotion}, that does seem to be a parsimonious explanation.

I do not think that Dawkins' formulation of the existence of God as a scientific proposition makes much sense, and it's an example of over-scientification of matters of philosophy - he fails to account for the idea of undecidable propositions (the existence of God being among them). Dawkins is actually a good example of someone who makes a bunch of attacks on Theism (cf the title of his book), when if it is merely a matter of him personally not having a belief, why would he care so much? Further, the spectrum displays a profound ignorance of religious people - doubt is a normal part of the religious experience, and he denies that sincerely religious people experience doubt (that is, the expressions of typical religious people would have a lot more degrees between his "1" and his "2"). .

I have a conviction that there are no such bunnies, due to lack of atmosphere.

I take it that you don't study much philosophy or theory of knowledge - there is a gigantic conceptual difference between "absence of evidence of X" and "evidence of absence of X". In code terms, it's the difference between an as-yet-undeclared variable and a variable set to (null).

Atheism is an absence of belief, not a belief in absence. Few people who self-identify as "atheist" have an affirmative belief/faith in the non-existence of a deities. Atheism is just the default position of an absence of belief through faith. It doesn't require "proof" of anything.

This doesn't describe most of the Atheists I've met, who affirmatively proclaim the non-existence of God(s). Perhaps a differentiation could be made between "atheists" and "Atheists" - the former would be as you describe, and the latter would describe a person who expresses a conviction that there is *not* a God.